Creative writing for translators: Writing a marketing text to a brief

We’ve received some wonderful feedback from our translator colleagues about our blog on creative writing for translators,  so we thought we would publish this week’s task so you can join us and try it out for yourself! This week, we will focus on writing to a brief.

What to do

Find a hotel somewhere close-by and go in for an afternoon coffee. Take a pen and paper.

The task

You have been contracted by the hotel to write a beautiful and informative short article about the hotel’s bar/lounge area that they want to promote to their customers. Write the article in your mother tongue.

Medium & word count

Your description will be published on the hotel’s website, and also in a printed welcome guide in the guest rooms. There is space for roughly 300 words.

Who are you talking to?

You are addressing visitors of the hotel’s website who are browsing the site before their stay, as well as hotel guests reading the welcome guide. You are addressing both business and leisure travellers (think about their motives for staying in this hotel and why they would benefit from visiting the bar/lounge).

What are you trying to achieve?

You want to draw the reader’s attention to this area of the hotel and encourage them to use it during their stay.

What are you saying?

Describe your surroundings: the interior design (style, genre, chic, minimalist, etc), the atmosphere (mellow, professional, any music playing? etc), what can you do here, what’s the menu like, what can you see when you look out of the window?

What do you want the reader to think/feel?

You want to create a picture of the bar/lounge area in their mind through vivid and positive descriptions. You want your readers to think ‘That sounds nice’, ‘That’s worth a look’ or ‘I like the sound of the menu’.

How should you come across?

Positive and inviting without ‘selling’.

Why would they believe you?

You are writing from the hotel’s perspective. The text needs to feel honest and unpretentious so that the reader feels they can trust your judgement. You definitely don’t want to make things up or embellish the truth. Once they go and see the bar/lounge area for themselves, they don’t want to feel disappointed.

Have fun writing! Want to share your musings with us? Feel free to send us your creations. We’ll pick the best ones and publish them on this blog post with a link to your translator profile 🙂

Happy creative Friday afternoon!